Revisionists on American Revolution Brooding on Left and Right

The Sun (New York): Revisionists on American Revolution Brooding on Left and Right

This July 4, while most Americans are celebrating Independence Day, a growing number of revisionists will be brooding.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, because it isn’t restricted to the hard left, which has long cast aspersions on America’s founding revolutionaries as a bunch of white male slaveholders.

Encounter Books, a conservative publisher funded largely by the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, recently published a book called Treason of the Heart. It lumps one of the heroes of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, in with traitors who spied against Great Britain for the Communist Soviet Union. The book contends that Paine’s accusation that the British wanted to make the Americans into slaves was nothing more than “a smear,” and that the choice Paine presented in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, between independence and slavery, was a false one.

The author of Treason of the Heart, David Pryce-Jones, is senior editor of National Review, a conservative magazine, and the book was warmly reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

Another prominent figure on the center-right, Conrad Black, wrote last year on National Review Online that “‘no taxation without representation’ and the Boston Tea Party and so forth were essentially a masterly spin job on a rather grubby contest about taxes.”

Messrs. Pryce-Jones and Black are British, so perhaps their mixed feelings about July 4 are understandable, even if published here in America.

More puzzling, to me, is the Brooklyn rabbi — described by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg as “an important figure in liberal Jewry,” and someone I know to be intelligent and dynamic — who recently posted, “That stupid introduction to the Declaration of Independence, that pretentious, idiotic, self-absorbed nonsense about ‘certain unalienable rights?’ It’s precisely where we went wrong!”

Then there’s the New Yorker magazine, which published a piece on what its writer called “the venality, misinformation, hysteria, and violence that led up to the Revolution.” The article approvingly quoted a historian who contended that it wasn’t clear “that the pursuit of equality need have included violence or that the equality sought necessitated independence.”

It’d be overstating things to group these disparate dissents or criticisms into a movement. Some of the revolutionary revisionism is driven by a partisan backlash against the politics of the contemporary Tea Party movement, with its anti-tax fervor and invocation of the Founding Fathers. Some of it represents entirely appropriate efforts by academic historians to examine the familiar story of the American Revolution from new perspectives.

Professor Bernard Bailyn, whose course on the American Revolution I took at Harvard, wrote a wonderful book called The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, about a Massachusetts governor who was loyal to the king. Even the American Revolutionaries themselves, one imagines, would have approved of a certain irreverence toward established views, whether those views were of the relations between monarchs and colonists or of the traditional historical interpretations of the founders’ own actions.

Yet if the revisionism isn’t yet cause for alarm, it certainly bears watching with careful concern. Our culture of fireworks and cookouts makes the Fourth of July a happy day. Less reliable are the educational institutions by which the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution are transmitted.

If there’s something to celebrate this Independence Day, perhaps it is that even with Americans educated in government schools and by a largely left-wing professoriate, truly negative views of the American Revolution are less the rule than newsworthy exceptions. For that we can thank not only National Park rangers in places like Philadelphia, Boston, Lexington, and Concord, but also authors, teachers, and museums. And, most of all, the enduring power of our nation’s founding ideals.

Mr. Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of Samuel Adams: A Life.